Sarah's case

-Warning this story contains suicide, gore, and sexual violence. Mature subject matter.-

Standing in the pouring rain, my raincoat dripping on my shoes, I’m looking at a dead guy. His head is splattered on the sidewalk. His brain is all over the place. Crows will probably be feasting of his brain cells for a few days before someone takes his body out of here. There’s a red channel, a mix of blood and water that

Wait, let’s backtrack a little.

The year is 2032. The civil war has ended. Everything is shitting sideways. I’m an old fashioned private eye, trying to keep my head screwed on straight. My name is Maddux Marlow. I’m a 45 year-old ex-cop and ex-college football player, tight end, the best position in the game.

If you’re looking for a Dick Tracy-like private eye, I’m not your man. Fighting I can handle. I’d even say I love it. I always carry my Beretta handgun and am ready to take it out. I do wear a raincoat only because, since the big climate change, it’s always fucking raining. It’s a pain in the ass.

I don’t really get a day off. In my kind of work there is always something going on. Like today.

I’m at home, chilling in my living room watching the weather channel, and thinking about doing a Roxy, when a guy passes by my window, falling head first to his death. My cheap, open space loft is on the eleventh floor. The building is located in a poor neighborhood, which is about the best I can afford. Here we’re used to seeing dead bodies. Last week a body stayed on the sidewalk for two days after getting shot in the head.

So, I should go downstairs to make sure the guy didn’t fall on my car, a vintage 94 Chrysler. I assume he’s one of those people, craving the likes, who wants to boost his social media score. Society has lost its fucking mind. All these social media kings and queens make me sick to my stomach. All kids pushing boundaries and putting themselves in danger just to be the next best thing. Social Media production is no longer a one person job with a mobile device filming himself. Now they have production teams and editing teams behind them. It’s a business nowadays. The new trend is live murder or suicide, anything that will get more likes.

This brings us to my new case. When I open the door to go down to see if my Chrysler’s okay, there’s a girl standing in front of my door. She tells me that a social media queen is missing, and it’s a complete mystery. Her social media name is Sarah Shine, but her real name is Sarah Sanders. She’s off the grid and nobody knows why. Probably some kids know something or someone has a last video file of her. It’s her younger sister who’s telling me all this shit while she stands before me, and blocks the way to the elevator. I don’t care about those young web stars, but this kid won’t let me pass. She shoves the last video of her sister in my face. In the video she’s petting a little cat, and she speaks about the cat like it’s her fucking pussy. You bet this is going viral on some channel. Her followers are mostly old pigs over sixty. Sis thinks she might be in danger, maybe kept hostage by one of her followers.

She tells me, she found me on the old refurbish Pentium III illegally plugged onto the dos web, the old and slow internet. Years ago I put up an ad on the old cop site. She bats those big watery eyes at me, so I take the case. The Chrysler is fine, the guy fell about twenty feet away from it. He’s still face down on the sidewalk in a pond of warm blood.

I drive while she gives directions to her parents’ house. One hand on the wheel and the other on my $10 cup of coffee. My window is cracked open which makes a whistling sound as I drive. I can feel the tension rising and we both stop talking. If I close up the window, the car will fog up with all this fucking rain. The ventilation is shit in this vintage Chrysler. The whistling gets louder the faster I drive. It has the effect of a countdown with the tension getting higher. And then she lifts her mini skirt a little to show me her see-through panties.

“I can pay you with my body if you want.” she tells me this while looking right at me.

I have trouble keeping my eyes on the road. I can tell it’s not her first time offering sex. It’s reality these days, jobs are rare, money is hard to get. A lot of young kids do this, guys and girls. But there’s no fucking way I’m gonna use a 18 year old girl as a fuck doll, I respect myself too much for that.

Her parents seem to be good people, not rich, but honest workers who never stole anything besides an internet connection. I have difficulty looking straight at her father. After all, I have just seen his daughter’s panties.

It takes 45 minutes of asking the right questions but I finally get the full picture.

The father is sick, and needs $250,000 for his operation. His daughter, Sarah, is insured for one million dollars. Maybe the parents are behind this mystery. Ever since Sarah is missing, her social account has gone sky high with likes and followers. Flowers are piling up in front of the parents house. The father tells me he doesn’t have the money to pay me, and looks at his younger daughter, and suggests she could help me. Yeah, I know what you mean daddy. The father is selling one daughter to find the other one.

Back in the car with Baby Sis, I make myself clear. She’s pissed and slams the door as she gets out with her panties in her hand. I go back home to stalk Sarah’s social account. There are loads of interesting comments, but one is more interesting than the others. A guy wrote that he thinks he knows where she went. Billythestud69, Billy Blanco, I go check him out.

It takes six knocks on Billy’s door, before he answers. He looks too ripped to cooperate, but he does. He tells me that he heard there is a place where girls can go to get fucked hard,and get paid big cash. Because her sister tried so hard to get my dick out of my pants, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was Sarah’s thing. Billy adds that the place moves from one building to another so they don’t get caught. He sure knows a lot for a kid. On the other hand, Sarah’s social media friends debunk Billy’s theory. They say she wouldn’t go anywhere without her mobile device.

All this research has made me hungry. So, I go to dinner. My favorite place to eat is Dine For a Dime, an old airstream trailer parked at the side of the road in a not-so-great neighborhood. It’s the perfect place for nightcrawlers, like me. The guys on the force all come here, even the retired ones.

I’m about to sit at a table and say hi to my favorite waitress when I see a young girl sitting alone at the bar. I have nothing to lose, so I go sit next to this good looking blond. I order what I usually order; the soup du jour with french toast and coffee. She’s like an open book. She doesn’t stop talking about herself, like all the kids of her generation. I don’t get a chance to introduce myself, before I’m ready to pass out from boredom. Then she starts talking about a secret members-only club she desperately wants to get in. She wants to boost her media shit with sex. But she doesn’t know what it’s called. Now I have to find that club.

I have to go see my tipster. I wonder if she knows about this club of people paying for sex. And maybe she has heard something about Sarah Shine. Her name is Natalia Nikityna. She speaks English with a broad accent and rolls her Rs. She’s a web podcaster and trend followers, not that I understand what she does exactly. But if there’s a new trend she’s the one who will know about it.

There is only one phone booth left in town and that is my outside office. This is where I make all of my phone calls. The places where Natalia wants to meet are always awkward and weird. When she answers her phone, she tells me to meet her in the beauty shop while she gets her hair dyed blond, like Sarah. She knows Sarah is missing, but has nothing on it. But she does know about the club, she wrote an article about them last month, she says. The group is called GFG GROUP INC, a real estate investment group.

The library is not the only place that has internet, but it’s the fastest. I know it’s a cliché but the librarian working there is very nice looking. It doesn’t take me long, as long as I keep my eyes on the screen, to find the GFG HQ address and all the houses they have for sale. It’s weird, the place is located downtown where nobody does business anymore. The last business moved from there a long time ago. It’s a bad place even for me.

Downtown is deserted, we all call this place “The Zone”. Tonight it’s just me and some stray dogs. There are no cars in front of the HQ building which looks abandoned. I think the real office is probably in a nicer part of the town. Through the front window, I can see a dim light. Someone is in one of the back offices. Time to find the back door.

Behind the building a luxury car is parked close to the wall, like someone wants to hide it from the street. He must have fucking big balls to leave a car like this to the mercy of anybody walking by. The back door is not quite shut, so I go in. The hall is empty, but I hear sounds coming from further up the hall. Just in case I take my Beretta out. I wear my gun at my hip like a cowboy. I always loved the western movies. The colt 45 is my favorite gun. I came close to owning one once. It’s the reason why I became a cop in the first place. Western were part of my childhood and I wanted to ride a horse and fire a gun at the same time.

As I walk further into the building, it sounds like someone is moaning, possibly through a gag. I also hear two or three men’s voices, Maybe four. I stop at the door, my gun in hand, safety off. Inside the room are three naked guys and a naked girl, who is tied to a table, with all three holes filled. That would explain the gagging sounds. When I tell the three wooden dicks to move away and face the wall the girl starts giving me shit about stopping her sex party. Apparently she was about to cum. I ask her name and no she’s not Sarah Shine, even if she has blond hair. So, I ask her about Sarah Shine. Without trying to cover herself up she tells me she saw a video of Sarah with Billy, billythestud69. Now I have to go back to Billy’s house. I leave the GFG group to their party, but I think the party’s over.

Back at Billy’s house, a mobile home in a trailer park, the lights are off, nobody seems to be home. It’s late in the evening, I assume they are sleeping. So, I decide to knock anyway. Billy comes to the door, he looks like I feel. I ask him to come in my car, so we can talk.

I tell him I know that he knows where Sarah is. So he spills it all. He fell for the oldest trick in the world. She’s in his parents cottage outside of town. The cottage is in the middle of a cornfield. The only place where you can be away from all those dumbass dickheads. It’s an hour drive from town.

The cornfield takes me back to my grandparents’ cottage. I spent all my childhood summers there. One summer my grandfather went out in the cornfield and blew his head off with his Colt. We never knew why he did it. I was in the field with him, he was holding my hand when he shot himself. I was too young to understand what happened to him, I just saw the blood everywhere. He had said the Colt was supposed to be mine once he passed away, but I never knew what happened to the gun after that.

It’s as dark as a monkey’s butt. So, I shine the headlights on the front of the house. Outside, it’s calm and quiet. Besides the endless rain hitting the roof, there is no sound. Billy unlocks the door. When he opens the door I can see a blond girl sitting at the kitchen table in complete darkness. Though the headlights shine all the way to the kitchen, I can’t see her face, only the light reflecting off her blond hair. When she hears us walking in she turns her head and I see the freckles on her face. It’s her. I finally found Sarah Shine.

She wanted to vanish to increase the number of fans and followers of her story. And more likes would mean more money, in a week of publicity she went from 150,000 followers to 1.1 million followers, she will eventually have the money to save her dad. But even in our shitty world it’s illegal to fake a disappearance or a kidnapping. I have to report her, she might do time, or not, I don’t care. I’m not here to judge, my job is done.

Behind the rain clouds the sun is up, the night’s over. Going home, tired and wet.

Ten-four, I’m out.